– “They just said on Radio Four that China will not be coming to Glasgow.”
Look a little deeper, beyond the propaganda intended to make us peasants demonise the Chinese government:
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+cop26
Reuters – “China’s Xi will not attend COP26 in person, UK PM Johnson told”, according to The Times, a Murdoch rag, quoting an unnamed source. Further down it notes: “Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, has not left the People’s Republic since the beginning of the novel coronavirus pandemic. He has joined video calls with global leaders.”
You have equated the leader with the government, and with the geography, and with the people that happen to have been born there, as you always seem to. If you have freed your mind of this hateful propaganda ploy, now please free your language of it too, so that you stop unwittingly spreading it. The BBC is rife with it, and thereby indoctrinates it.
And why is it Johnson, in particular, has been told this? More propaganda – next paragraph:
– “China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter so Xi’s absence from discussions – either in person or via video calls – would mark a setback for Johnson’s hopes of getting world leaders to agree a significant climate deal.”
“Johnson’s hopes”? As if the whole COP26 conference were Johnson’s personal project to save humanity! Johnson does little but lie, fornicate and burnish his own macho image by deploying aircraft carriers towards China. “Let the bodies pile high” said Johnson recently. “Take control of our borders” said Johnson, who refused to keep out SARS-CoV-2. His only plan for British emissions is a fat contract to Rolls Royce to re-purpose submarine nuclear reactors, which though it makes some sense is not nearly enough. These reactors are one twentieth the power of a normal power station; scores of them would be needed. That would be popular, wouldn’t it? And with so many reactors needed, Britain would use up its uranium stockpile in a decade or two and we’d be back to where we are now, but with a hundred more tonnes of radioactive waste and a load of obsolete reactors.
So what’s the Chinese government’s real objection, if they even have any and Xi isn’t just sensibly avoiding Plague Island Britain by using a video link?
– China and Saudi Arabia have failed to make written UN climate commitments ahead of COP26, iNews can reveal, punching a major hole in the UK’s ambitions to reduce global carbon emissions. Both countries, which are among the world’s biggest polluters, declined to submit updated pledges in time for the UN’s deadline this week to further reduce emissions ahead of the climate summit in Glasgow next month.
Ah, our allies the al Saud family, what a surprise! Maybe the Chinese government would feel more reassured if Western governments pressured the al Sauds for a change, instead of gifting them huge quantities of very advanced military hardware and the training to use it.
Michael – “the Chinese Communist Party has issued orders for all coal producers in China to quickly ramp up coal production.”
Yes, of course they have, or the country’s electricity will fail and masses will freeze, water supply and sewage pumps will stop and disease will break out:
– The emergency meeting underscores the critical situation in China. A severe energy crisis has gripped the country, and several regions have had to curtail power to the industrial sector, while some residential areas have even faced sudden blackouts. China’s power crunch is unleashing turmoil in the global commodities markets, fueling [shortages] in everything from fertilizer to silicon.
By far the highest emitting major country per head of population, and the country that has used the most of the total carbon that humanity can get away with burning, is the USA. The USA also repeatedly destroys other countries or subverts their democracy to control hydrocarbon reserves. To achieve this it runs the most invasive secret service and the biggest military on Earth, accounting for half of all military expenditure globally. That military is the biggest burner of fossil fuels and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases of any single organisation in the world. The USA is also the biggest importer of stuff manufactured in China – yet China is blamed for the emissions produced in its production. Yet somehow the USA’s emissions barely ever get a mention in our corporate media – except when Trump was president.
“Putin is laughing”, “China is wrecking the planet” – if you sounded a bit less like a propaganda victim, I’d be less inclined to dismiss. Maybe your style is parody of the corporate media, but that’s impossible to tell without intonation; you do seem to link almost exclusively to corporate “news”, and you seem repeatedly to fall for their tricks, eg. “Chinese military aircraft invading Taiwan’s airspace”.
All humanity is thirty years up shit creek together, we’re short of fuel and our boat is leaking faster every day. We either stop squabbling and cooperate, or we drown in shit. Together. So please stop seeming to cheer on the squabbling.